Our research team has completed a full background briefing on Mr. Lawson. You can check out the entire backgrounder here: Who is Nigel Lawson?

Here’s some of the highlights:

Climate Change Expert?

According to a search of Google Scholar, Lawson has not published any work in the area of climate science.

Climate Contrarian Family

Climate skepticism runs deep in the Lawson family. His son Dominic Lawson is a journalist for the British newspaper The Independent. Dominic Lawson has used his columns to question the science behind climate change and criticize the IPCC. Ironically, Dominic Lawson is married to Rosa Monckton, the sister of the infamous climate denier Christopher Monckton.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation

In 2009, Nigel Lawson founded a climate change think tank, The Global Warming Policy Foundation. Although the organization presents itself as an independent and unbiased voice, it clearly has an agenda which is expressed loudly in its mission statement: “our main purpose is to bring reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant.”

Comments

In related news, the soon-to-be-out-of-print Washington Times published a front page story titled “Global warming controversy reaches NASA climate data.” The article described how a “U.S. researcher” from the Competitive Enterprise Institute has been unable to get NASA to release some data he wants. And what is this “researcher’s” credentials?

Denialists have for years claiming that they can’t get data from researchers when the data is publicly available. In the few cases they can’t get the data publicly, they bother the wrong people for it as some data can’t be released with permission, and the people who get asked aren’t the owners of the data. The denialists playing these games know this, of course, but publicly claim they are being rebuffed.

The biggest problem is that the is a well-funded movement out there to disseminate lies to confuse people. Since most of us can’t tell good science from bad, the science ends up looking far less certain than it is. It’s the “smoking doesn’t cause cancer” industry-funded PR campaign all over again.

Don’t you love the Alarmist circular logic. Everyone is too stupid to understand global warming but us, so you should listen to us and only us on this issue. Their is a scientific consensus on global warming as we have excluded all other dissenting opinions.

And the PR Circle goes around and around.

Nigel lawson has credibility on the issue. Convince him of the alarmist rhetoric and you’ve probably convinced the other half of the globe to go along with the carbon crazy credit card scheme.

"Fossil-fuel companies have spent millions funding anti-global-warming think tanks, purposely creating a climate of doubt around the science. DeSmogBlog is the antidote to that obfuscation." ~ BRYAN WALSH, TIME MAGAZINE